The Good Old Days (1947 - 1981) is a strip about which we know little. Created by Erwin L. Hess, it seems to have been sort of a paen to, well, the old days. It's hard for us to see its appeal, though, as the days after 1947 were a much better time to live in than the years from what appears to be approximately 1890 - 1910. Apparently, it was something like the Dilbert of its day in that readers sent in their own experiences which then became the basis for episodes of the strip. Here we see two examples of spankings, at least one of which was suggested by an old lady from Omaha.
© United Features Syndicate. Posted by the Web-Ed on 08/06/2010.
Now of course, spanking in the home was common at that time, but were girls of nineteen and twenty included? (If these strips featured child-spanking we wouldn't have included them - as it is, we're stretching a point since there is a clear indication that a younger sister has just been spanked). It's certainly possible, at least in the home - we know of one woman who was spanked at home by her father until she was thirty(!) - although at school, spankings were not given to girls of 18 - 20, if we may take what Mark Twain tells us in Tom Sawyer as a reliable guide.
Smoking cigarettes in public, which helped trigger the spanking in the first example, was indeed considered somewhat scandalous behavior for females before the 1920's. In the second example, the girl's only offense seems to be kissing her boyfriend on the porch - again, if the father only knew about the liberalization of sexual mores that was to take place in the Roaring 20's, his reaction here might have been more restrained. And we hope that guy peeking in through the window is the boyfriend and not some passing weirdo.
We'd sum it up this way: the good old days weren't all that good even if they did have a lot of spanking, and these particular strips are more valuable as historical documents than anything else. We much prefer the "discipline with romantic overtones" spankings we've seen recently in strips like Captain Easy and Brenda Starr.
Erwin Hess did some comic-book work for Dell, but as we don't collect Dell titles, we don't know if there were any spankings in them.
